At 00:49 on the night between 1 and 2 September, a daughter reported to Skopje police that she could not reach her mother or her mother's husband. Thirteen hours later, that same woman found them both dead in the flat. So there is no mystery about who found them - the mystery is about everything else.

According to the official statement from the Interior Ministry, the two are a 50-year-old woman and a 37-year-old man, both Taiwanese nationals. The report of the discovery came in at around 13:50 on 2 September. A Skopje police team went to the scene, and a doctor from the Institute of Forensic Medicine pronounced both dead.

The initial examination found no visible signs of violence. The bodies were sent for autopsy, which is to establish the cause of death. Until then there is no official cause - and that is the only sentence the police can say without getting ahead of the facts.

What is left hanging in the air is those thirteen hours. A missing persons report enters the system before one in the morning, and the bodies are found in the afternoon - by the same person who filed the report. What were the police doing in the meantime? Checks, the ministry says. Nobody has explained what kind of checks take thirteen hours when two people have vanished at the same time from the same flat.

In the afternoon, neighbours saw a heavy police presence around the building and funeral vehicles, but nobody knew what was happening. That is the ordinary Skopje scene: the institution knows, the neighbourhood guesses, and the information arrives through a window rather than through a statement.

The first reports listed the pair as Thai nationals. The ministry then corrected it - Taiwanese. That is one letter in some of the media and an entire country in reality, and the correction came after the story had already gone around. When the basic fact of two dead people's nationality changes over the course of a day, it says something about the speed of publishing and the pace of checking.

The autopsy will give a cause of death. The question it will not answer is why a report filed at one in the morning ends with the person who filed it finding the bodies herself thirteen hours later.